When you see the green checkmark on a wikiHow article, you know that the article has received careful review. In this case, we tested the instructions on our own devices and confirmed that the instructions worked.

How to Clean Up a Slow Performing Computer

This wikiHow teaches you how to clean out old files, programs, and settings which cause your computer to slow down. If your computer is still performing slowly after these steps, consider taking additional steps to speed up your Windows or Mac laptop or desktop.

Click Optimize…. You'll see this to the right of the "Optimize Storage" heading. Doing so will prompt your Mac to get rid of any temporary or unnecessary files, as well as move your watched movies and TV shows into iCloud.

6

Uninstall unnecessary programs. If you have any applications or programs which you don't want to keep on your Mac, deleting them will clear up some space and help your computer run faster overall.

Close a program if necessary. If you see any high memory usage apps which don't need to be running right now, click one app's name, click End task in the lower-right corner of the window, and repeat until you've closed every app or program that you want to close.

This process is easier if you click the Memory tab to sort the programs from greatest to least in terms of memory use.

Click Quit or Force Quit when prompted. Clicking Quit will allow the program to attempt to create a recovery save if you have work open, while clicking Force Quit will immediately close the program in question.[2]

Understand what defragmenting does. Defragmenting a hard drive is only necessary on heavily used Windows computers. As the hard drive ages, pieces of data become scattered throughout it, thus increasing the amount of time it takes for that data to be retrieved. Defragmenting the hard drive places all of the "fragments" back in the same general part of the hard drive.

If your computer uses a solid-state drive (SSD), you should never defragment it.

If your computer's hard drive is almost full, defragmenting it may not have much of an effect.

On the best ways is to download CCleaner and run the cleaning scan. It will look at several browsers and see if stuff like cookies, download history, browsing history, and other things. It can really clean up memory and storage with that. If you don't want to download any programs, try running Disk Cleanup and Defrag/Optimize Disk. Those will clean up your computer.

It's inadvisable to have more than one antivirus program on your computer at a time. Since Windows comes with the Windows Defender program pre-installed, you shouldn't have to install an antivirus program on a PC.